ABSTRACT
Research on metaphor has primarily (and for good reasons) foregrounded the problematic sides of metaphors. Metaphors shape experience, they can foreclose options, they suggest norms and cultural values and, in doing so, they may even be lethal, as physician-writer Abraham Verghese (2004) argues in relation to HIV/AIDS metaphors. In psychotherapy and palliative care, metaphors have enjoyed a better reputation. In these disciplines, metaphors are considered helpful tools for patients and doctors to understand problematic thought patterns and change patients’ behaviour by rethinking confining metaphors (Kirmayer 1993; Ogden 1997). In end-of-life contexts, metaphors offer a protective “veil” for patients who need to avoid or postpone, for a moment, the “glare of reality” (Hutchings 1998). When patients use metaphors, they often do so to explain what an illness experience is like. In lack of a language of illness (Woolf 1926), figurative speech makes the inexplicable expressible (Conway 2013).
